The Flying Boat Forum from www.seawings.co.uk

Welcome to the first ever Forum dedicated to the history and operations of the world's Flying Boats and their crews brought to you by SEAWINGS. Enjoy your stay and come back often! You are more than welcome to contribute, however small or large. Enjoy!

This section is for discussions on biographies relating to persons associated with flying boats. Original manuscripts, stories from surviving flight and ground crew, good books, in-fact anything about the people behind the craft.

Here's a book you may not know of "Maritime is Number Ten - The Sunderland Era" Author : "Flight Lieutenant K. C. Baff RAAF". It took me a mighty effort to track down the author - he was serving with 10 Squadron at the time. I stumbled across this site just a day or so ago, can't even remember how - I might have been looking for models of Sunderlands. And that came from a recent contact with a guy worked with at a company that once used a Cat as an aeromag survey plane. But I've always been a Sunderland fan - my father was with 10 Squadron in the UK for part of WWII. The old photo albums were always fascinating to look through - kind of missed the flying boat period on Sydney Harbour. Anyway "Maritime is Number Ten" is a comprehensive log of the operations and personal of the flying crew of 10 Squadron RAAF.

I guess the other reason I've a renewed interest is that at the ANZAC Day March this year there were no representatives of the Sunderland squadrons present, just the covering banner, and almost not a mention of their service by the commentators. I think these guys are the forgotten sqaudrons - the flying boats were always associated with glamour and grace but are simply forgotten because their story is rarely told or told correctly.

For those of you who haven't found it - the National Library of Australia/Australian War Memorial have all the photographs of that period now on-line. I'll sort out the link and post it later.